Income Inequality

June 11, 2000 | Karlyn Bowman, Karlyn Bowman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

A 1999 Times poll found that nearly 60% of Californians who described themselves as working or lower class expected they would be able to move up the economic ladder. Many at the bottom have, in fact, been making progress during this long expansion. This may be one reason why inequality, a hot topic for politicians and journalists in the 1980s and early 1990s, is getting less play these days. When people at the bottom and top are gaining ground, inequality is less potent.

WASHINGTON - President Obama's sixth speech on the state of the union will spotlight many issues, but more than anything may illuminate the vast gap between his policy ambitions and the tools he has to achieve them. The president made the ambition clear last month, when he referred to a “dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” in the United States as the “the defining challenge of our time.” His overriding goal, he has said in speeches and interviews, is to reverse the trend in which incomes for most Americans have stagnated since the late 1970s while the share going to the wealthiest has soared.

Some California lawmakers worry that California is losing too many businesses to other states. State Sens. Mark DeSaulnier (D-Concord) and Loni Hancock (D-Berkeley) evidently worry that we're not losing enough. DeSaulnier and Hancock are the authors of SB 1372 , a measure that purportedly addresses one of the most talked-about (and, Democrats hope, politically fertile) problems with the U.S. economy: income inequality. Specifically, they take aim at the compensation packages that publicly traded corporations give their chief executive officers.

The "digital divide" has been back in the news recently--but, as usual, only briefly. On July 8, the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration released its latest report in a series called "Falling Through the Net." This is an ongoing study of telephone, computer and Internet use in the U.S. that can be viewed at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/digitaldivide. In it, the government reported (using 1998 data) that 40% of U.S.

WASHINGTON - President Obama's sixth speech on the state of the union spotlighted many issues, but more than anything it illuminated the vast gap between his policy ambitions and the tools he has to achieve them. The president made the ambition clear last month, when he referred to a "dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility" in the U.S. as the "the defining challenge of our time," a theme he repeated Tuesday night. "After four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better," he said, "but average wages have barely budged.

Click here to download TV listings for the week Nov. 4 - 10 in PDF format This week's TV Movies SERIES Richard Hammond's Crash Course: Richard trains to be one of the crew tasked with changing a wheel in an IndyCar race in Sonoma in an episode that features a drive around the racetrack with legendary driver Mario Andretti (7 and 11 p.m. BBC America). How I Met Your Mother: Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) decides to take action when Robin (Cobie Smulders)

British bitcoin exchange Coinfloor opened its virtual doors to customers this week with a stated commitment to meeting government regulations and keeping money launderers out. The London-based exchange will officially open to trading Tuesday, but it is allowing customers to sign up and register for accounts beforehand. Coinfloor is launching at a time when bitcoin is facing increased scrutiny after the arrest of Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old from San Francisco who allegedly masterminded the online drug emporium Silk Road.

April 14, 1991 | GEORGE L. PERRY, GEORGE L. PERRY is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution research organization in Washington

One of the classic trade-offs in economics is between equity and efficiency. Under many circumstances, arrangements or policies that enhance one of these goals do so by sacrificing some of the other. Since the early 1970s, the U.S. economy has managed to do poorly on both counts.

September 1, 2008 | Leo Hindery Jr., Leo Hindery Jr. is currently managing partner of a New York-based media industry private equity fund. He chairs the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and is an unofficial economic advisor to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Not all that long ago, America's prominent business and government leaders widely believed that our nation's prosperity depended on a strong middle class growing from the bottom up. Workers were rewarded for their hard work with fair wages, benefits and advancement opportunities -- and our economy and our national security were much stronger for it. Henry Ford certainly knew this, and often said that his company would prosper only if his workers...

On a day when President Obama explicitly sounded the alarm on rising income inequality in the United States in a speech in Kansas, protesters in Washington chose action over rhetoric, disrupting a fundraiser for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. As part of the “Take Back the Capitol” movement that has descended on the capital this week, protesters stood outside a tony D.C. restaurant, giving the business to lawmakers and lobbyists who tried to enter and chanting “We are the 99%!